You Can't Spell 'Sith' Without an 'S', 'H', 'I' and 'T'.

(I blatantly stole that gag from the fellows at Reason, just so ya know)

Every once in a while, my job will require me to process and deliver the daily mail to the Wisconsin State Senate. It's kind of a repetitive task, but not so bad as all that: I can lose myself in the mechanical letter-sorting process, and I get a little quiet time alone to think things over, which is always nice. Since every senator gets a copy of every newspaper that's published in their district, I get to look these over before I deliver them and see what's going on in the cities, towns and unincorporated hamlets of the great state of Wisconsin (short answer: not much).

Can you guess which story is splashed all over the front page of every Wisconsin newspaper? Yup, the big Star Wars premiere. Not exactly what I'd consider breaking news (and I'm as big a Star Wars nerd as you're likely to run across), but fair enough: like I said, there ain't exactly a lot of competition for column inches for most of these publications. What was weird, though, was the fact that almost every one of these papers ran a picture of some bunch of goons dressed up in this or that type of Star Wars paraphanillia engaged in pitched light-saber battles in front of the movie theater. Every one! There were light saber battles in Wisconsin Rapids, in Kenosha, in Richland Center, in Oshkosh, in Rice Lake, everywhere! Now I'm all for fan participation, and although I poke fun at the guys who dress up like Vulcans or Imperial Stormstroopers or whatever else, I do so out of love - I'm into all that shit too, and although I don't like to fly my nerd flag at full staff all the time (inasmuch as I have control over how nerdy I seem in public), I respect those who do. That said, the fact that light-saber duels seem to have become the Official Nerd Activity for those who wish to kill time while waiting in the cue seems to take away from the spontaneity, no?

Anyway, here's an article from my home town paper: "'Star Wars' Gave Hmong Kids Hope." I gotta give 'em credit, this is a vaugely interesting twist on the 'dedicated Star Wars fan profile' that every news source has had to dust off for this week.